Britain’s two world wars were fought as much by economists as they were by generals. Finding a strategy to pay for the wars against Germany and her Axis allies was a key part of Britain’s national survival. Hitler’s economic strategy was based around conquest and plunder, with occupied peoples paying for his wars and Germany’s standards of living. In Britain’s case, the USA by 1941 was the country’s source of economic salvation and it was John Maynard Keynes who had most interaction with the American treasury officials and diplomats to negotiate not only the wartime loans but also the shape…

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  In 2014 I attended a forum held by No 10 Downing Street at Wembley Arena. Holocaust survivors and their families were being invited to participate in the Prime Minister’s commission for a permanent memorial for the Holocaust in Britain. Since the 1990s, successive British Prime Ministers have each attempted to out-do their predecessors in their desire to acknowledge and embrace the legacy of the Holocaust. Organisations like the Holocaust Education Trust, who I work for from time to time have benefitted in terms of funding and their ability to influence government policy, and the profile of the Holocaust has…

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Here, in a nutshell, is why is set up this blog, podcast and YouTube Channel. I think.

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By the time most teachers have started delivering GCSE or A level lessons on Nazi Germany, their pupils will already have consumed hours of movies, documentaries and YouTube clips about Hitler. This, you might think, is an advantage. Rarely can a classroom teacher expect their learners to come prepared with subject knowledge so when they do it should be embraced. Well, yes and no. Perhaps more no than yes. A two dimensional, highly simplified and mythologised version of Germany in the 1930s is absorbed from the various history cable channels by learners who come to the lesson with the following…

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This is a video I recorded earlier today, focusing on the memory of the Holocaust in Europe and America. I’ve already done quite a lot on debates surrounding the origins of the Holocaust so this is more focused on the contested memory of the final solution:  

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In 1918, at the end of the First World War, Thomas Edward Lawrence was unknown to the vast majority of the British population. Throughout the 1920s, however, his wartime activities were popularised and he became a military celebrity that ranked alongside Horatio Nelson. Lawrence had been British intelligence in Egypt’s liaison with the Arab rebels of the Hejaz and had waged a guerrilla war against the Ottoman Empire. He was one of the few Arabic speakers in the British Army and had worked before the war as an archeologist in Syria. He was a complex and contradictory figure, at once…

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In 1922 the Institute for Social Research was established in Frankfurt, bringing together many of the more disparate strands of leftist thinking in Europe in the aftermath of the First World War. Here’s a video on a small part of the institution’s vast impact on 20th Century thought.

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When I studied American history about 27 years ago, during the late 1980s, we gave a cursory look at the development of post war suburbia. In a packed syllabus there was little time to do the topic justice. Considering the many millions of Americans the development of suburbia affected, both positively and negatively, it should be regarded as one of the most significant developments in the study of 20th Century American social history. One glaring omission from the textbooks was the racial dimension to the development of suburbia and the fact that it was planned and developed as an exclusively white…

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One of the problems with the teaching of GCSE history is the tendency for narrative to insert itself into specific modules. This is perhaps unavoidable as history has been passed on as story for tens of thousands of years and taught as an intellectual discipline for a little over 200. It is important to be mindful, however, that as a module ends, the idea that the issue in question has been ‘resolved’ is ‘over’ and/or ‘fixed’ can be unintentionally communicated to pupils. It goes without saying that this can result in a teleological and ahistorical view of change over time…

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By 1934, Britain appeared to have survived the worst effects of the great depression. Unemployment had begun to decline and new light industries in the south and the midlands had developed, supplying consumer goods for an affluent middle class. Britain’s economic problems were regionalised, however, and in the worst affected areas such as South Wales or Tyneside adult unemployment exceeded 70 percent. This podcast explores the response of the Jarrow ship workers, who look part in one of the many protest marches to London that were organised throughout the 1920s and 1930s. Their march, in 1936 received minimal support from…

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